Red RumA Rosie Casket Mystery R.M. Wild Version 1.0 (3/20) Copyright © 2021 by R.M. Wild All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Description How do you like your firewater? Straight? Or do you prefer a good chase? After finally receiving some publicity in a national magazine, Rosie Casket has her hands full trying to keep her bed and breakfast afloat. But when new clues bob to the surface about her sister’s disappearance, she gets sidetracked from taking care of the inn and goes sleuthing for answers. Unfortunately, those answers go up in smoke. Literally. Now, not only is she accused of perpetrating the most impossible murder that Maine has ever seen, but everyone in Dark Haven thinks she is a witch. Will the prophecy from an ancient riddle prove true? Will she and Matt Mettle move closer to a relationship—or will he become the murderer’s next victim? And can Rosie keep her head above water long enough to stay out of the cauldron? Or will she get burned at the stake? Red Rum is the third book in the Rosie Casket mystery series. A little darker than the first two, it moves faster than a brushfire. Go on, take a thrill pill…click now and discover the secret ingredient in Red Rum! Contents Free Boxset Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 47. Epilogue Dear Readers Also by R.M. Wild Free Boxset Been wondering what got Rosie banished to the rubber room? Visit www.rmwild.com to get a free prequel boxset! Prologue Fifteen Years Ago Where the hell was that lazy witch? The street was empty and dark, all the clerks’ and lawyers’ cars fled for the night, the yellow circles from the street lamps overlapping each other like the shiny links in a pair of handcuffs. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I admitted that I had an urge to include stupid as a more accurate modifier for “witch,” but seeing how it was already nine o’clock in the evening, and I had been standing outside the courthouse in the cold and waiting for her to come pick me up for more than four hours now, a more appropriate adjective was selfish. A few hours ago, I had turned down a ride from Mr. Flint, the lawyer who had represented Stanley Eldritch at the hearing to determine whether or not there was enough evidence to drag him to trial for the disappearance of my sister Chrissy, but I was getting desperate enough that I was now regretting my real mother’s advice not to take rides from strangers. My stomach got all fluttery from the prospect of swearing, but I thought this juncture warranted it. Where the hell was she? To be fair, I wasn’t entirely ungrateful toward my foster mother—after all, thanks to drugs and meditation, she did suffer through a relatively smooth and painless adoption when I joined the Slate family. Given that she spent most evenings locked in her room with a bottle of wine, I could only conclude that the shock of seeing my shock of red hair on the front stoop the night when my real mother abandoned me must have been enough to turn her carefully planned world upside down. Other than those three hours of labor in which her husband made her fill out the paperwork for legal custody, Amy Slate had never worked a day in her life. At least not that I was aware of. Before agreeing to take me in, she was a proud stay-at-home mother of one teenager. Afterward, she resented the extra cleaning. A glass of wine and a soap opera had turned into extra trips to and from school (Chrissy usually got rides from older boys with driver’s licenses). Thus, as soon as I was old enough to drive myself to school, I was pretty sure Amy Slate was going to throw herself a freedom party. On top of that, not a day went by that I didn’t resent the nickname she gave me: Rufus. Ugggh. I hated it. I hated the sound of it. I hated the way it made me feel like a boy. I hated when she said, “Rufus! Get me a wine glass!” In fact, when I made the transition to junior high last year, the boys overheard Chrissy using the nickname and they became so relentless in their teasing that I had to spend most of my lunch breaks in the bathroom stall. Where are you hiding, Rufus the doofus? Hey, Fiddler on the Rufus, don’t cry over red hair! Throughout my seventh and eighth grade years, my inner dialogue festered and fermented so much that I grew my own baby-bump. When asked if I was pregnant, I said, “No, just angry.” One day, I had a feeling my repressed inner dialogue was going to make me explode and bite everyone’s head off. It came earlier than I thought. I paced the manicured grass. Behind me, the toilet-bowl-shaped Sunrise County Courthouse was lit bright enough to make its limestone walls look like porcelain. Why did they waste so much taxpayer money keeping the lights on all night? Probably to keep the lawyers from breaking in at midnight and prosecuting each other. Underfoot, the grass was so perfect, so stiff for this late in the year, that I could feel it poking through my sneaker soles. I could only assume the strips of green were fake, kind of like those squares of mini-golf carpet placed on the floor of the school lavatory. Maybe it was a lawyer thing since my foster father’s grass was just as perfect. “Where are you, Mother of mine?” I mumbled. “You’re ridiculous.” Ever since waking up this morning,
